Is it still safe to give birth in the NHS?

It should be one of the most joyous moments in a woman’s life. Yet, for too many women in Britain, childbirth has become a horror story.

This week, the Guardian revealed that the NHS is facing a £27 billion legal bill over negligent maternity treatment in England since 2019. This figure not only dwarfs the £18 billion budget set aside for newborn care in that period – it also represents nearly half of the NHS’s £60 billion overall negligence bill. The same report found that nearly 1,400 families took legal action against the NHS for obstetric failings in 2023 – twice the number in 2007. Despite numerous inquiries, reviews and public figures promising change – on cue, the Labour government is said to be considering a ‘rapid’ inquiry – it is clear Britain has been catastrophically let down by an institution we are constantly told to venerate.

For all its talk of compassion and care, the NHS refuses to treat women in labour as human beings with agency and instincts worth listening to. Time and again, we hear the same stories: mothers begging for help, warning healthcare professionals that something feels wrong, only to be dismissed or told they’re overreacting.

During my own experience of childbirth (I have given birth three times), I had to be very insistent about receiving pain relief. I found myself asking constantly for an epidural, but I was regularly fobbed off by midwives pushing me to do a ‘natural birth’. For all three of my labours, the ward was understaffed on busy nights – with just one anaesthetist on duty, running between calls for epidurals and emergency Caesarians. This left women without pain relief for hours.

The relationship between midwives and doctors can also be tense. Sometimes it is broken completely. This has dire consequences. As was highlighted by the Ockenden report in 2022, many patients are denied the care they need because midwives are hesitant to escalate concerns to doctors. There is, unfortunately, a big emphasis in modern midwifery on ‘non-intervention’, meaning many women are discouraged from having epidurals or C-sections, even in cases where they strongly believe it’s what’s best for them.

I don’t think I will ever forget the birth story of former Conservative MP Theo Clarke, who chaired the Birth Trauma Inquiry. She described the appalling care she received in 2022, where after a very complex labour and delivery she bled heavily and was rushed to emergency surgery. What happened next was just as harrowing:

‘While on a recovery ward after my surgery, I encountered one nurse who had not bothered to read my notes and assumed I had had a C-section. I was hooked up to a catheter, a drip, and was paralysed from the waist down. I was lying in bed, with my baby in a cot next to me, and she was screaming. This was my first child and I couldn’t pick her up so I pressed the call button, and a lady came in and said, “Not my baby, not my problem”, and then just left me.’

Almost the exact same thing had happened to me after the birth of my first child in 2019. Paralysed from the chest down, I was unable to pick him up from his cot. The on-duty nurse basically ignored me when I asked for help. It was a shocking thing to happen when I was in such a vulnerable state. Listening to Clarke, I realised that these kinds of incidents are not one-offs.

We were given a bleak reminder of just how widespread these kinds of problems are only last month, when Nottinghamshire Police announced it had opened a corporate-manslaughter investigation into two local hospitals after the deaths of hundreds of infants. This followed similar scandals involving the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust and the Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust.

Almost any woman you speak to will have a story about their bad experiences with maternity care in the UK. My own mother could not believe how much things have deteriorated since she gave birth over 30 years ago. Hospitals had nurseries then: babies were taken away and looked after so the mothers could recover. Today, there is a widespread belief that separating newborns from their mothers causes ‘attachment issues’ – which is troubling, considering how many exhausted women struggle to look after a tiny baby immediately after going through labour. A little respite would undoubtedly make the process much easier.

The UK is very much an outlier in the developed world when it comes to maternity care. No other health service has a negligence bill like this to pay. Sweden’s public maternity care, by contrast, has one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world. Much of this is down to early intervention, continuity of care and bigger budgets. Tellingly, the UK lags behind other developed countries in multiple other health outcomes, including life expectancy and cancer survival.

It is completely unacceptable that in a wealthy country, where vast sums are spent on the NHS, that mothers should receive such terrible care. The birth of a child is one of the most intense human experiences imaginable. The squalid and negligent conditions so many women have had to endure are inexcusable.

These are not minor mistakes. This is not about a few bad midwives, consultants or hospitals. It is a systemic, institutional failure – symptomatic of an NHS that is incapable of providing the services we pay for, and is hostile to reform.

Candice Holdsworth is a writer. Visit her website here.